This presentation will focus on how technology planning can lead to benefits in the creative and practical realms of interpretive and strategic planning, as well as play a critical role in the ability of museums to advocate in their best interests. Many organizations find themselves saddled with expensive or inappropriate technological solutions that fail to deliver desired outcomes. Often this is because the ‘bells and whistles’ of technology have driven the ideas – and not the other way around. Whether planning for new technology to enhance visitor experience or improve marketing or business practices, much of the concept-driven process is similar, including the use of effective planning steps to ensure a successful outcome. This presentation will also address how technology can be a powerful tool – not just to engage or market to audiences but to extract information to help organizations evaluate strengths and weaknesses and make better decisions for the future. How does all this relate to advocacy? Creating meaningful and engaging learning experiences can transform visitors into stakeholders. Being able to evaluate the success of interpretive and strategic plans can furnish proof that museums matter profoundly, as catalysts of learning, civic pride and economic development. (Karen Hengerer, Anne Thwaits, and Emily Duwel)

3. Understand your Business Process Visitor arrives Member? Purchases? yes no Update Mailing List & Attendance List Update Attendance Store Data Store Data Update financials and Inventory Store Data Done yes Done no

4. Data Inputs & Outputs – Sample ‘Gift Shop’ Input System Output Employee Timesheets (define format) Personnel/HR Financial Employee cost by activity Payroll Guest Book/Ticket, etc. (define format) Mailing List Attendance Record Attendance Data Communications Gift Shop Receipts (define format) Financial Purchasing Update Inventory Sales Heat/light by department (define format) Financial Operating Costs Postage, printing Financial Mailing Costs (combine with employee cost by activity) Etc, etc., etc., …

16. Wise Technology and the Creative Business of Museums A Museum Educator’s Perspective Anne Thwaits [email_address] June 3, 2010

17. Charles Willson Peale The Artist in His Museum 1822

18. The National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, PA, is filled with high-tech exhibitions, artifacts and interactive displays.

23. “ Rather than learners being empty vessels into which information can be poured, they come… with a wealth of knowledge already organized. It is upon this knowledge structure that learners hang new information, creating new links to their pre-existing knowledge.” K. Jeffery-Clay

25. What Visitors Want Surprisingly, technology is not a high priority

26. What Visitors Want Pre-Baby Boom Baby Boom Generation X Generation Y Millenials 1946 1965 1977 1992 Birth year 2030 Vision: Anticipating the Needs and Expectations of Museum Visitors of the Future : A 2007 report by the Smithsonian Institution Office of Policy and Analysis

27. What Visitors Want Pre-Baby Boom Baby Boom Generation X Generation Y Millenials 1946 1965 1977 1992 Birth year Want stimulating exhibitions and interactives that will help them stave off dementia and maintain brain function Good family activities to do with grandkids Assistive technologies to help compensate for loss of hearing, vision, motor function, etc.

28. What Visitors Want Pre-Baby Boom Baby Boom Generation X Generation Y Millenials 1946 1965 1977 1992 Birth year Most educated generation yet Want to be more involved parents than their parents were Want to get their kids away from screens for real, active learning experiences

29. What Visitors Want Pre-Baby Boom Baby Boom Generation X Generation Y Millenials 1946 1965 1977 1992 Birth year Attached to the constant communications and info-gathering power of new technology tools Social experience is important – want constant connection with others Want to create, contribute to, comment on, manipulate, remix, and share content Want immediate access to info from many sources

30. interactions with technology in daily life outside of the museum shape the amount of involvement visitors want to have with their learning, their preference for social or collaborative learning experiences, and their expectations of rapid response and quick turn-around and refresh in museum programs and activities.

33. The Black List Project Brooklyn Museum Two Macbook computers, and instructions for their use, used to capture Community Voices to YouTube in The Black List Project, an exhibition of portraits by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders that explores being black in America.

34. The Black List Project Brooklyn Museum

35. World Beach Project Victoria and Albert Museum, London

36. World Beach Project Victoria and Albert Museum, London

37. Emily Düwel Interpretive Planning Exhibition Development Think Sense studios www.thinksense.org | [email_address] Co-Design, Technology and the Museum Paradigm

39. Co-Design in Practice ... visitors contribute scientific research and become environmental stewards, through complementary on-site and online activities... Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico La Esperanza Nature and History Reserve On-site Citizen Science Visitor Activities include bat counting and bird monitoring Cornell Ornithological Lab Partnership Citizen Science / Wildlab Online Citizen Science Visitor Activities include tracking bird migration and pathology.

40. ASU Museum of Anthropology Visiones Sagrados / Sacred Sites Room for the Dead (both museum and online exhibits) Visitors created altarpieces for loved ones or favorite icons, as well as contributed interpretive texts. Oracle Historical Society Family Histories: Día de los Muertos 2007 School kids conducted oral history interviews with family members and created altars commemorating a particular past relation. Visitors create and/or interpret art for museum display, producing a form of visual ethnography Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico. La Esperanza Reserve – Manor House Visitor Center Interpretive Plan A Place Over Time: Photos and Memories Community stakeholder life stories will be interwoven with images of La Esperanza sugar-cane workers by WPA photographer Jack Delano.

41. Visitors contribute their experiences of history and its interpretation.... Architecture of Segregation Proposed Traveling Museum Exhibition Dynamic Oral History Website Component People contributing both stories and photos documenting their experiences of segregation in the United States ... from both sides of the fence. National Museum of the American Indian Washington, DC Native American nations determine how their culture and history is represented and participate directly in curation. This effort represents the most seminal instance of co-design shaping a museum from the ground up.

42. Integrating scholarship with co-design... ApachesTellTheirStory.org Apaches of Aravaipa Canyon, Inc. Website Project Goals: 1. Establishes institutional presence and communicates its core mission. 2. Shares new scholarship that – for the first time – attempts to incorporate an Apache point of view. 3. Invites stakeholder participation in helping to shape the future form of an interpretive center.

44. MUSEUMS and MEMORY... Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

45. Museums and Websites serving as universal repositories of both public and private memories...

46. Memory Archives as vehicles for co-design... Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker Disseminet ( www.disseminet.org ) A non-linear keyword-based investigation of accounts of the disappeared in El Salvador. Hippo Camps Public Memory Project The as yet unlaunched version of a new collective memory application City Design Center Chicago Database Future goal is to incorporate city plans and documents with individual experiential accounts of different urban sectors.

48. What It Means to Storm the Museum: Machine Projects – L.A. “ Etymologically speaking, “machine” is any means of doing something. Our explorations at Machine Project reflect this by investigating everything from knitting techniques to ideological frameworks for the construction of reality. ...” LACMA Intervention A few of the many ideas governing the idea of visitors being given opportunities to take over and re-interpret the museum... “ Garden on top of the elevator. Student driver parking valets. Child docents. Clap-activated lighting. Boat puppets. Laser eyed statue heads—please guard your eyes. Beware of pie toss. Saint Bernard with brandy neck-cask wandering around the landscape paintings. Abandoned luxury items. Preparator workshop. Can we drill into the floor? Whoopie cushions, everywhere. A voice hidden inside a pedestal occasionally shouts out a comment or interjection....” www.machineprojects.org

50. Strategic Planning Matrix (Borrowed and adapted from John Durel, Organizational Coach, QM2/ Durel Consulting Partners) Projects falling under Nos. 1through 3 are good. Projects falling under Nos. 6 through 9 should be avoided. For many museums (unlike for-profits), No. 5 may proportionally outweigh all others in terms of benefit (e.g. the “blockbuster”). Resource Levels (staff, time, funding, space, etc.) Little #7 #3 #1 Some #8 #4 #2 Huge #9 #6 #5 Little Some Huge Impact